JohnF. said:
This only happens when you connect to the internet - disconnect your
machine and you would be surprised at how smooth your computer will
run and how reliable it will be.
You seem to be missing his point. His point is that in other areas, these
types of things don't happen.
But even if your argument were true, it would not be relevant. If he were
constantly annoyed in other areas by questionably legal activities, it would
still not justify it happening on the Internet.
Same thing happens with your telephone. Call after call after call
after call for refinance, travel, non-profits, surveys, cable vs
satellite, etc... it's non-stop. Disconnect your phone and the
silence is beautiful - if you can.
I don't get those types of phone calls. There's a national "do not call"
list. Even before then, I just told companies to put me on their list and I
almost never got those calls. Those businesses know that it costs time and
money to call somebody, so they expend their resources on people who are
likely customers. I'm not likley to get a phone call from somebody selling
Viagra because there's no indication that I need it or would buy it.
Computers ARE complex, more so than a vcr, which most people have no
idea how to setup and use properly and they are obsolete junk now.
That's why several companies have tried to sell set top boxes that
allow you to surf and to process email. For some reason though,
people would rather fight and cuss over a computer than to get a set
top box.
Again, this has nothing to do with pop-ups or anything else. Complexity is
also not very relevant. What is relevant is the user interface. Cars are
complex. Mine probably has more on-board computers than I even know about
and they are performing complex tasks. They are constantly making
adjustments to my engine, and tracking all sorts of systems. But my car is
easier to drive than a 1962 sedan, which has relatively little technical
complexity. The computers in my car never annoy me with pop-up windows. They
do give me relevant information when something is wrong with my car, or if I
need washer fluid or gas, or if it's time to change my oil.
So, the problem is really people.
No. You've identified a single attribute and applied in in an irrelevant
way. If anybody were to accept that statement, they would have to accept it
for virtually any argument whatsoever. Yes, spammers are people. So are
people who design adware. But they constitute such a small percentage of
humankind that blaming it on human nature is irrelevant. If somebody
complained about cannibalism, I could give your same statement. It would be
equally accurate, but equally irrelevant.
Look at it this way: If you
eliminated all the insects from the earth that annoy us, the Earth
would be dead in a few months - eliminate all the people however...
different story.
That's not true. If all insects were eliminated, that would be true. But
if it were limited to the ones that posed a direct danger to us, and did not
include the ones that were not in proximity to us, it would not be true.
Leaving insects for birds to eat but using mosquito netting for ourselves is
not an environmental problem. Allowing advertising for those who have
expressed an interest, but disallowing it for those who have said that they
don't want it will not harm anybody. If anything, it's the other way around.
If somebody had told me 20 years ago that I could get all the targeted
advertising that goes to my mailbox sent to my email instead, I would have
jumped at the opportunity. It would have saved me the time of combing
through my junk mail, saved the environment, and made life easier. But the
assumption would have been that it was the same targeted advertising that I
was already getting, not random spam. Because of the spam problem, I don't
even get targeted ads since I became disgusted with the whole concept. But
I'd probably be better off getting catalogs as PDFs instead of getting them
in the mail.
So squashing beneficial advertising or beneficial insects is not the answer.
It's eliminating those that annoy or harm us that's the issue.
